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Monday, 27 June 2011

Choose Your Own Adventure Project - Day 5

Today was THE day! The students hammed out the grammar for their annotations and then we headed to the lab to start linking videos together using YouTube's annotation feature. It's amazing how a few hours can be condensed into a single sentence :-)

The Process
1. Due to unusually sad attendance this morning, my 4 groups of 3 were each missing one person. Nice symmetrical absenteeism! Yay! Also, bizarrely enough, none of the missing people were the owners of the YouTube channels that had the videos uploaded to them last class. Double Yay!

2. Since this is the last week of our 4 week study block AND since Friday is a stat holiday here in Canada, we had to use some of our morning class to prep this up. We're also down to one lab, so we had to get in while we could .

3. Students worked with their partner in class and created grammatically correct annotations for each of the decision arrows on their storyboard using the CYOA Annotation Planning handout. They wrote their sentences down (each made a copy) and then had someone from another group check their grammar. After that, I checked them too. Just in case. Unfortunately I forgot to check their video titles...*sigh*

**Note: I asked the students write their annotations with "You" instead of "I"...this followed the format of the CYOA novels we had read earlier in the project.

4. To the crap-lab! Partners sat together. Partner A signed in to their own YouTube channel (where the videos had been uploaded to the other day).

5. Partner B went online to YouTube and found their videos with a quick search. Partner B then copied and pasted each video link into a Word doc on our shared server file. This was done so Partner A could just copy and paste each link into the appropriate box while annotating. After finishing, they closed the file.**Note: If Partner B made a numbered or bulleted list of their links, this caused some problems when pasting the link into the annotation box - the number or bullet point came too! Scroll back in the link and make sure there is nothing before the http: part!

6. Partner A opened the document that their partner created and started copying the sentences and links into each of the annotation boxes for each video. They used the CYOA Annotation How-to handout to guide themselves. Partner B's new job was to go to each of the videos after their partner was done and click / test-drive each annotation! VERY important and we caught a few errors this way!

7. We got all of the lab work done in an hour. The in-class writing took approximately 20 minutes.

Hope all this verbosity is helpful to you! If you want to know more, drop me a line!
Thanks!